Is 2022 the start of India’s Electronics R&D?
Despite being a huge consumer of digital as well as electronic devices, India fails to develop and raise a domestic manufacturing plant to satisfy its country’s digital devices requirement.
Having a huge market in this opportunistic world can be considered a boon as well as a bane too.
With the world eyeing like a hawk on India’s booming market, the country’s domestic lineup is lagging behind those big corporations’ glittering concessions that lure Indian users towards their products.
This led to a huge loss of market for domestic manufacturing as well as MSMEs that fails to attract the users due to lack of investments.
Such is the case with India’s Electronics R&D and its consumer electronics market that needs huge investments to establish its manufacturing plants all over the country.
Despite being a huge consumer of digital as well as electronic devices, India fails to develop and raise a domestic manufacturing plant to satisfy its country’s digital devices requirement.
Sensing the huge disparity of heavy imports and lack of proper infrastructure in the country, the Indian government stepped up its initiatives a few years ago and started promoting indigenous markets and its products with “Make in India”, and “Atmanirbhar Bharat” as well as “Digital India”.
This started a chain reaction that coupled with the government’s proactive initiatives caused cost efficiencies, and technical competencies with a low-cost workforce that has now enabled India ready to set up India’s Electronics R&D centers soon to accelerate investments and employment opportunities.
Before venturing into the realm of How India’s Electronics R&D Centers Grow in 2022 and will satisfy its global thirst to compete at the global level, let us explore why we need an Electronics R&D in the first place.
Why are India’s Electronics R&D Centers Needed?
Though India was facing a major lack of domestic products and industries for a long time and multiple programs and initiatives were taken to abate this growing crisis, COVID-19 gave India the first major setback when every country’s trade and exchange came to a halt abruptly during its long lockdown period.
As previously mentioned in my previous articles, “Is India’s Ecosystem for Electronics Start-ups Viable?” Or in “Journey of Schemes for Electronics Manufacturing So Far in India”, the country desperately needs a stable manufacturing infrastructure to stabilize its domestic needs as well as India’s Electronics R&D centers.
One thing that pandemic taught India was to become self-reliant as soon as possible since we saw how large crisis got abated for those countries that were self-reliant in those times when everything was in short supply.
And it is a proud moment to be seen how India’s tech muscle grew during the lockdown. According to various analysis reports, India saw a new unicorn be minted every ten days in India during 2021, as we became the third-largest start-up nation in the world, next only to the US and China.
Similarly, setting up more and more of India’s Electronics R&D centers will equip the country with enough skill force that could develop and engineer its own unique set of semiconductor chips as well as electronics parts.
Current Scenario of India’s Electronics R&D Centers
According to the latest report, India’s electronics manufacturing industry had grown from $37.1 billion in 2015-16 to $67.3 billion in 2020-21, which is in huge contrast to a major decline seen in 2020 due to strict COVID regulations.
This shows the massive potential India’s consumer electronics market possesses that led to the start of the government’s supportive policies in this direction with a Rs 76,000 crore chip manufacturing package to put India in the big league to design.
Since electronics is a meta resource for all semiconductor-based verticals, the government’s vision is to hit $250 billion via domestic electronics manufacturing by 2025-26 from about $70 billion in 2021.
And this achievement will, later on, push India’s Electronics R&D to grow further with the latest innovations in this emerging field.
Rapidly spreading its roots in the electronics niche, India is on the path to becoming a hub for semiconductor design as the country is currently on its way to designing nearly 2,000 chips per year with more than 20,000 engineers working in various aspects of chip design and verification.
Due to this, the number of India’s Electronics R&D, as well as design bases, will increase exponentially and in turn will give rise to more skilled professionals and engineers in the future.
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing or C-DAC is another branch of Indian Centre for Development of Advanced Computing that is based in Thiruvananthapuram.
And is currently one of biggest India’s Electronics R&D centers. The center has heavily contributed to India’s electronics sector through its indigenous development of systems and products, adaptation and upgrades with foreign technology absorption consultancy and training along with the turnkey implementation of contract projects.
In a recent turn of events, Chennai has been ranked first among the world’s cheapest FDI locations of the world as well as to set up India’s Electronics R&D centers with an estimated annual operating cost of around $1.24 million for a 50-person center.
Conclusion
The Indian government has recently taken several initiatives towards promoting India’s Electronics R&D centers with schemes like the Make in India program, the National Policy on Electronics (2019), the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme for the electronics sector, SPECS (Scheme for Promotion of Manufacturing of Electronic Components and Semiconductors) Scheme as well as Electronics Manufacturing Clusters (EMC 2.0) Scheme, and many others
However, this is just the start of restructuring India’s domestic market to compete with the world’s big techs while stabilizing its market to make India a manufacturing hub in the next few decades.
